Spacetravel

....





... and there it goes... into the firmament



This could be a pretty good metaphor for self-valuing. It's in that moment of closeness, too-closeness, that one shudders in a grasping - then the objective world is back, darker and vaster than ever.

I still remember the exact moment of "leap of faith" when I first approached self-valuing. It required a non-derivative step, perhaps something anathema to most serious philosophers. I was lucky because I already had theorized the logic of such leaps in principle, thanks to help from Nietzschean thinking.

Character is what happens at the threshold.

Space travel is the next step in philosophy forming a world for itself, which is what "philosophy" really always meant anyway.

The world is, if nothing else, an apology of philosophy. Humanity is vindicated. Always has been and always will be.

Yes, character, that is precisely what happens.

Our common love of astrophysics and the outer reaches has been a deep, mostly unspoken layer underneath our collaboration - a shared taste, or a shared lack of fear -
and taste is surely the way in which nature overcome fear.



Or: fear rules in the absence of taste, where taste makes fear into an instrument of beauty.